Too many children in care are suffering physical and emotional abuse, and the
authorities are turning a blind eye, says Christopher Booker

Last week’s report on the wholesale abuse of children in Oxford yet again exposed the terrifying contradiction at the heart of our “child protection” system. Although the report focused only on the ordeals of six children, these were taken to be representative of nearly 370 others who, between 2004 and 2012, had been subjected to rape and abuse by Asian men. Two points emerged, as they did from the rather more forthright reports on what happened to those 1,400 similarly abused children in Rotherham.

One was that five of those six Oxford children, and presumably therefore hundreds more, were in state “care”. The other was that, despite countless attempts to alert social workers and the police to what was happening, no action was taken until 2011, when seven of the much larger number of men involved were finally arrested. Nothing is more chilling about all these reports than the evidence of how these children’s repeated appeals for help were not just ignored but treated with contempt.

If this is one side of our unspeakably corrupted “child protection” system, the other, as I have been reporting here for years, is the ever-greater number of children whom those same social workers and police are only too ready to remove from their families for often wholly spurious reasons. Furthermore, as the number of children removed has risen to more than 28,000 a year in England and Wales alone, there is growing evidence that far too many of these children endure much more serious physical and emotional abuse in “care” than anything alleged to justify taking them from their families in the first place.

Yet to this, just as in Oxford, Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere, the social workers, police and the courts seem only too ready to turn a blind eye. At least in those instances, something of these horror stories has at long last been coming to light. But still almost entirely hidden from view, thanks to the wall of secrecy the system has erected to protect itself, is the other half of what has become unquestionably one of the most horrifying scandals unfolding in our country today.